Securable places are those in which you can live safely without undue fear of being injured or killed by other people or by wild animals, and where your home is safe from those that would pillage it. Securable Places once built walls to assist in repelling armed attackers. These walls also caused a sharp inflection in property values, because a home just inside the wall was clearly of much greater value than a home just outside. This helped preserve farmland outside the gates and make the place a nourishable place.

Today, the problem is more complex because those most likely to do you physical harm or to steal your belongings are not armed bands from a nearby town, but rather individuals or small teams of criminals that operate largely out of sight rather than storming the gates. But it is no less important to figure this out, because how can a place be considered sustainable if people abandon it because of fear?

Gated subdivisions are the current popular solution, but they fail miserably to create a community on too many counts to discuss here. There are other ideas, but much work clearly remains to be done in order to learn how to build Securable Places that are great places to live, work, shop, play, and visit. But once we succeed in figuring out how to build secure places again, then we will create the added benefit of making places that are identifiable against the rolling sameness of sprawl that renders the neighborhoods of cities from Denver to Des Moines to Dallas to Durham indistinguishable one from another.

Porches, Walkability, and Sustainability looks at how the elements of the Private Frontage foster relationships between neighbors, putting more eyes on the street and building bonds of community that make a place more secure.

Gated Subdivisions would seem to be the most defensible places to live, but they actually create a more dangerous place outside their gates, so overall safety is compromised. They also have longer response times from police and fire units because of their gates.

Securable Places on OGTV

Securable Places Albums

São Paulo, Brazil illustrates a place with high security needs, but where the solutions may actually be contributing to the problems.

Securable Places Presentations

All presentations entitled "Original Green" on the Presentations page deal with all eight foundations of sustainability, including securable places.